14

ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 1, 1962, ERNEST WITHERS met up with James Meredith at the Memphis home of Meredith’s attorney, A. W. Willis. It was the first day of fall classes at the University of Mississippi, where Meredith had enrolled as the school’s first black student.

A riot had broken out at Ole Miss the night before, as a thousand students and outsiders violently protested Meredith’s enrollment and arrival on campus. Two people perished, including journalist Paul Guihard of the Agence France-Presse.

Meredith and Willis rode out of Memphis toward Ole Miss, seventy-five miles southwest in the town of Oxford. Withers and journalist Larry Steele followed one car behind. As the caravan crossed the state line into Mississippi, a highway patrol vehicle jumped on Willis’s tail. “I prayed,” Withers recalled. “I never prayed so much in all my life.”1

FBI agents and National Guard stood at the entrance to the university. Withers took some pictures, and his reporter colleague took some notes. Withers, explaining that he had achieved the goal of seeing Meredith set foot on campus, didn’t stick around: “We came in to prove that he was here and got the ‘h’ out.”

In the aftermath of the Ole Miss riot, Withers reunited with another protégé of L. Alex Wilson. Dorothy Gilliam had worked at the Tri-State Defender around the time of the Little Rock Nine and later become the first African-American female reporter at the Washington Post. “All hell was breaking out in Mississippi,” Gilliam recalled. “The Post sent me down to see what the mood was in the black community.” She drafted Withers for help. “I knew [he] knew how to negotiate,” she said.2 She also liked that Withers had Tennessee license plates on his car, believing that Northern tags brought unwanted attention.

Withers and Gilliam visited Medgar Evers, the state’s NAACP field secretary and a veteran of many Mississippi battles. Withers had met Evers nearly eight years before, when Evers led the search for witnesses to the slaying of Emmett Till. Evers had also spearheaded the mission to relocate witnesses to Chicago who’d risked their safety by testifying against the suspects.

Now, despite the Ole Miss riot, Evers promised that African Americans would apply to the state’s other segregated universities. “We don’t intend to let this thing fizzle with Meredith,” he told Gilliam.³

But the violence in Mississippi didn’t fizzle either. Eight months later Evers was dead.

As one news organization attested in an obituary, Evers had survived the Allied landing at Normandy, only to fall mortally wounded in front of his home, while carrying a batch of JIM CROW MUST GO T-shirts.

On June 15, 1963, three days after Evers’s death, Withers traveled from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, to cover the leader’s last rites. He brought his son Perry and his editor, Thaddeus Stokes, of the Tri-State Defender. At the funeral, Withers captured a sorrowful moment as Evers’s widow Myrlie braced their son with an arm around his shoulders and absorbed the little boy’s tears into her handkerchief.

At the conclusion of the funeral, an announcement came that the City of Jackson had issued a permit for mourners to march from the Masonic temple, where the service took place, to the funeral home that would prepare Evers’s casket for shipment to Arlington National Cemetery. Withers, along with his son and his editor, followed the cortege. Thousands marched two miles in one-hundred-degree heat behind the hearse, past silent police dressed like soldiers on the sidewalks.

After the casket reached the funeral home, a few hundred marchers turned around and headed back the way they’d come. People sang freedom songs and danced.

Three blocks south of the funeral home, at an intersection the marchers had just passed without trouble going the other way, they encountered a barricade of policemen standing side by side in shiny hard hats, with shotguns shouldered.

The permit had legally allowed the march to proceed only from the Evers funeral to the funeral home, and after that, the march became illegal. The police might have let it go. Instead, they initiated a standoff with the marchers.

The show of force outraged many of the mourners. They’d just bade farewell to a vital, young leader cut down by gunfire. The main column of marchers stood still, staring ahead at the police line. A few moved ahead tentatively. “I could hear the dogs barking,” Withers recalled.4

Two large army transport vehicles backed up behind the police barricade. Withers wondered if soldiers were arriving.

A few young women danced toward the officers, jeered, and taunted, “You gonna shoot me?” “Go on and shoot me!”

The mourners began chanting, “Shoot—shoot—shoot!”

Bricks and bottles flew at the police barricade. “Then the officers started grabbing the demonstrators who were out in the street and began beating and kicking them and pushing them toward the trucks,” Withers recalled.

A crowd of onlookers had gathered on the sidewalk. A white man lunged through the police barricade toward the marchers, wielding a long-bladed knife. Withers took pictures—“All of the time I was standing on the sidewalk, photographing one horrible scene after the other amidst the screams.”

A burly white man from the crowd entered the fray. He threw Withers off the sidewalk, into the street, knocking off a piece of his Mamiyaflex camera, which consisted of a boxy rectangular body with two short lenses. As he reached down to recover his equipment, he felt the thump of a nightstick. He tried to step away, but each step led from one nightstick blow led to another. His ribs ached, and a knot swelled on his forehead.

From the sidewalk, Withers’s son Perry watched in horror as his father flashed into view, absorbed a nightstick blow, and disappeared again into the melee. Perry climbed a telephone pole for a better view.

Two policemen grabbed Withers under his arms and hoisted him into the back of one of the big green transport trucks.

Withers climbed in, pressed his handkerchief to his forehead, and felt it stick to the skin. He pulled off the cloth and saw it stained with blood. “As a news photographer,” he would write, “I have covered numerous racial incidents in the South, which began with the Emmett Till trial. . . . But it was only following the Medgar Evers funeral in Jackson, Miss., that I shed my first drops of blood in the line of duty.”5

Out in the street, the crowd moved back from the police, while attorney John Doar explained to those who could hear that he had come from the Department of Justice to observe the march. “And anybody around here knows that I stand for what’s right,” Doar reportedly said. “You can’t win with bricks and bottles.” He asked the mourners to peacefully disperse, and they did.⁶

The police continued to throw men, women, shoes, and handbags into the green transport truck. It sped away, with Withers and fifteen or so other people inside. The driver made abrupt stops and sudden starts, shaking up the passengers.

Next to Withers stood a college professor, John Salter, a veteran of Jackson demonstrations. Withers asked him if he had a smoke. Salter took out a fresh pack of Pall Malls and handed several to a grateful Withers.7

A woman near Withers said she suspected the police had arrested him for photographing their application of the nightstick and would confiscate his film. The police wouldn’t search a female, she said, and suggested he give his film to a woman for safekeeping. He handed his rolls to a young lady in a white dress.

The rough transport arrived at the city fairgrounds, and the police hustled the prisoners into a stockade. One of the cops yelled, “All right, we want this nigger photographer to come on out.”⁸

Withers stepped forward and was asked, “What did you do with the film?”

He said he’d lost it in the street scuffle, but the cop replied, “We know you gave it to one of them nigger women.”

Withers said he didn’t know anyone on the truck.

The cop announced, “We’ll search all of these nigger women till we find it.” With the prisoners crowded into a pen for booking, the police called over an African-American woman in a blue uniform to pat down the females, while one of the officers thoroughly searched Withers in front of everyone.

The policewoman discovered Withers’s film hidden on the woman in white. The police charged him with disturbing the peace and transported everyone downtown to jail.

At suppertime, the prisoners were fed, “and I observed that the food was better seasoned than it had been in Memphis jails,” Withers said.9 Meanwhile his editor Thaddeus Stokes called a Jackson police official, vouching that the photographer was a credentialed newsman and not a street protester. He sprung Withers, who escaped the incident without charges.

On the way out, Withers retrieved his film. It had been exposed, destroying the pictures of the police and their riot batons. Withers had been on the assignment for black papers in Cleveland, Baltimore, and New York, in addition to the Defender publications. The loss of the two film rolls deprived major segments of the black population of objective coverage of an important moment.

When he got home, Withers cleaned his forehead wound with witch hazel. He didn’t plan on filing charges or taking any action beyond telling his story to the local Defender.

Six days after Withers’s arrest, President Kennedy convened a White House meeting to stimulate discussion of creative solutions to civil rights issues. One of the participants was Memphis attorney Russell Sugarmon, who had helped to organize a Memphis branch of the Kennedy Club, the grassroots organization that helped convert African-American voters, including Ernest Withers, to the Democratic Party, as the Republicans shed their ideological connections to the Party of Lincoln.

Three days after Sugarmon met with Kennedy, Withers showed up at the Memphis FBI office to register a complaint. He explained to Agent Lawrence that he wouldn’t be complaining except that his attorney, Sugarmon, advised him to do so after returning from the Kennedy meeting.

In his statement to Lawrence, Withers described the ambush-style arrest of Jackson demonstrators: “The police shoved and pushed the arrestees, and I saw several instances where the police . . . hit the arrestees with billy clubs as they herded them onto the trucks. I took pictures of these arrests.”10

He had not willingly joined the fracas, he explained, but had needed to retrieve a piece of his camera that had broken off and landed in the street.

Lawrence immediately sent a memo to Director Hoover’s office, detailing Withers’s story and emphasizing the seizure and destruction of the film.

By this time, Withers showed little physical evidence of the beating, other than a swollen spot behind his left ear. Lawrence took color pictures of Withers straight on and of the small bump on his head and sent the negatives to the director’s office, with a request that the DOJ’s civil rights division receive copies of developed pictures. The next day Perry Withers and Thaddeus Stokes gave Lawrence statements that corroborated Withers’s account of events.

The Withers case offered a new and different legal challenge: the exposure of his film looked like a potential violation of his First Amendment rights, a federal crime. The case also exposed the challenge of finding justice in a department divided between the civil rights division and Hoover’s FBI. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, head of the DOJ, loathed and feared yet enabled his subordinate, Hoover. Withers’s case attracted the attention of high-powered Civil Rights Division attorney Burke Marshall, a colleague of John Doar, who’d helped disperse the Jackson standoff. Like Doar, Marshall was understood to be a civil rights sympathizer.

Hoover’s office carefully instructed the FBI New Orleans special agent in charge to investigate Withers’s First Amendment case. The office made it clear that Marshall—not Hoover—wanted to know whether the arrest of Ernest Withers occurred “because he was taking photographs or . . . he was believed to be a demonstrator.”

Two New Orleans special agents met with the Jackson assistant chief of police who’d released Withers. He claimed to have no knowledge of film or photographs belonging to Withers and said he never ordered officers to expose seized film.

The Jackson police officials interviewed during the investigation contradicted the accounts of Withers, his son, and his editor almost entirely.

John Salter, the activist who gave Withers cigarettes in the paddy wagon, recalled that contrary to the law enforcement version, “standard police practice [for] anyone, other than police agents, photographing anything in a demonstration context was to either seize and break the camera or to seize it and take the film.”11

Another Jackson police official said he had seen the arrest personally and that the officers didn’t beat or mistreat Withers in any way. The mass arrests had taken place upon the refusal of street protesters to disperse.

The U.S. attorney at Jackson thought the case had no prosecutive merit and the investigation should cease. As for Withers’s exposed film—proof of a First Amendment suppression—Agent Lawrence seems not to have logged it, thus disregarding potential evidence. In a photo of Withers accompanying the Defender story of his arrest, he holds two unwound rolls of film in his hand, identified in the caption as “deliberately exposed.”

Nothing about the Jackson episode hindered Withers’s intelligence gathering.

That fall Marjory Collins, a freelance photographer and writer, came through Memphis and got in touch with Withers to see his photographs of Tent City. She said she’d been in Fayette and Haywood counties doing research, on assignment for the Southern Patriot, a monthly publication of the suspected Communist front SCEF.

Withers reported on her visit to Lawrence. She had a press card for the National Guardian, Withers said, another publication long associated with Communism that had just as long attracted the interest of the FBI. And while in Memphis, she contacted SCEF by phone.

She carried a letter containing suggestions about who in Memphis might help her. (From the pertinent FBI report, it is not clear how Withers learned about the letter or how Lawrence obtained a verbatim copy.) Also in Collins’s possession was a pamphlet about the projected expansion of a program called Operation Freedom from Tennessee into Mississippi. It mentioned various Mississippi Delta racial leaders, whose personality characteristics, educational backgrounds, and financial resources and relationships Withers described to Lawrence. He also let Lawrence know that Collins stored her personal belongings in a locker at the Memphis bus depot.

When Collins parted, Withers asked her to keep in touch, and she obliged, sending word from New Orleans, which Withers passed along to Lawrence.12

At Lawrence’s urging, Withers obtained a press card identifying himself as a contributor to the Southern Patriot, the SCEF monthly. He wrote to SCEF for the latest issue of Patriot and other printed material it published. SCEF sent Withers its annual plan and financial information for the coming year of 1964, including the names of field staff, which ended up with the FBI. One of them happened to be the man who had given Withers the Pall Malls in the paddy wagon in Jackson.¹³